28 ¦ Error correction: Providing meaningful feedback that maintains motivation

[Music] I'm Ling Printer and this is the Motivated Classroom. Hello, Bonjour, Falker. Welcome to the Motivated Classroom podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in, listening and downloading. It's always fun to be here with you. And today we are talking about feedback and feedback loops. What are they? How does it work? How do we do corrections and error corrections? In a language classroom. That is what we are going for today. But of course, we always need to start with our little bit of Irish. And today I'm giving you some retrieval practice. It is Konesa Tato. Konesa Tato is one of the ones we had right at the start. Can you remember what it is? Konesa Tato. Correct, well done, you listeners, you're so smart. It does mean how are you? I could say Konesa Tato shiv because there's more than one of you listening. Well, I sincerely hope there's more than one of you listening. So Konesa Tato is a good phrase to learn for your Irish. There was a good response to last week's episode. People were very impressed that I can count to 10. And that even though I did go to 11, I at least explained I was going to 11. So I think I re-instilled a bit of confidence in many people that I can count past 10. So today we are going to talk about feedback loops. And thank you for the questions about this. People have been asking me about how I do error correction, how much I correct, what I don't correct, because I've shared some student work and people have asked me about that. So we're going to get straight into it now. But before we do, just a quick word of thank you. As always, a Grathias and a Guru Mahogat, the Irish for thank you, to all those people listening and sharing. And especially to the patrons on my Patreon page. Really appreciate it. I had some lovely new crisps this weekend. I'll share some pictures. People have been asking me to share my favorite crisps. So I will put that out there. Thank you so much to all of you. OK, feedback. So what I want you to do is we're going to do a little activity with this first. Now, as you're listening to this, I wanted to just stop and think about feedback before I go any further. Close your eyes, but well, not if you're driving or cutting vegetables or something dangerous. Please close your eyes if it's safe to do so. And just think and ask yourself the question, how important is feedback? If you are grading that on a scale of 1 to 10, how important is it? OK, now how often do you give feedback in any form? Again, let's imagine 10 is really frequently. And one is very infrequently. Where would you be on that scale of 1 to 10? I imagine that many of you listening to this put it pretty close to 10 for both of those that you think feedback is really important. And you probably feel like you give feedback quite regularly or we try to, or maybe it was a little bit lower for that. Maybe it was 7 or 6, but think wider about feedback. You're probably giving feedback all the time in your class without really realizing it, even just with your face. So there is feedback going on, but maybe you're thinking more about specific and structured feedback. And those of you who put 10, you would be right. It is incredibly important. And we want to try and move the learner forward. So I like to think about feedback, but also feed forward. So what do the learner need to do in order to get to the next goal or the next part of fluency that I'm hoping for? So it really is important feedback. And we try and do it as much as we can. But now ask yourself the question, how often do you collect feedback from your learners? And it's probably way less frequently than you giving feedback. And to be honest, it probably should be that way. You are the expert in the room, you are the teacher. But at the same time, if feedback is that important, then we should also be getting it from our learners too. So today I want to talk a little bit about feedback to the learner, but also feedback from the learner. And I'm going to start with that actually. Feedback from the learner. How do we get it? How do we make sure that what we're doing is, I don't want to put it like, you know, meeting their needs or meeting their expectations. And I don't want to treat it like a business like a client that they're happy. But at the end of the day, from a motivation and engagement perspective, the students feel motivated and engaged. And if you are teaching with autonomy, competence and relatedness at the heart of what you're doing and you're thinking about that, and they're motivated and they let you know that, it's going to be so much easier for you to achieve your goals and your outcomes. And you're going to see them progress so much quicker. So it's a win-win. So collecting feedback from them is important to know, what are they appreciating, what is working for them, and what do I need to change? And not to take that as an attack on you. But just to think, with this particular class, at this particular time, with the particular struggles they're going through, this thing is not working as well as I thought, so I'm going to change it. And to be open to change is really important. We know through the research, the teachers are historically resistant to change. And there's a lot of reasons behind that. But it's important to be open to changing, at least one or two small things per year, it keeps it fresh. So I've got six things here for feedback from the learner. But you know me with my maths. It could roll into five, it could be seven, it could be eleven. So we'll just see how we get on. So the first one is essentially post-its or the one-minute summaries. And they're the same thing essentially. No, I've ruined my list already. Because that means it's five, because I had those separated. Anyway, it shows you my planning needs some work. So post-its or one-minute summaries, it can be done digitally too, of course, depending on the space you're in. Essentially is the student's writing down. Two things that you learned or got from or enjoyed or appreciated in today's class, and one thing you want to do more of. They're the questions, takes one minute, and that's why they're called one-minute summary. Two things you got from the class, one thing you want to learn more of. And you'll often get a hand going up and asking, what do you mean, want to learn more of? And say, what kind of things do you want to learn more about? Do you want to learn more about culture? Do you want to learn more about how the language works? Do you want to learn a bit more grammar? Do you want to learn about how to tell more stories? What do you want to do more of in this class? And you collect those up, and you have a look at them as they walk out the door. And I don't do this in every class, and in fact, this is great thing about the podcast that makes me reflect on my own teaching. I think I need to do this more often. I used to do it quite frequently, and I'm going to try and bring this back in. So that is one way to collect some feedback from the learner. It's anonymous, and you can quickly see what things are they enjoying or appreciating and what they want to do more of. Number two is what's called the critical incident questionnaire. Now this one does take a little bit longer. You probably need five minutes, maybe a bit more for the younger students. And I do this maybe once a year. I do usually in the first six to seven weeks of class, and it just gives you an insight as to what is helping the students out in a way that is very open to them. They write down their class and the subject, but it's anonymous. And you can see what they're writing, of course, the right-in-front view. But there's five questions on it. And I got this from Jeff Petty's book called Evidence Based Teaching that I used quite a lot when I began my teaching career. And also, I think that he took it from Black and Williams' work on formative assessment. And there's five questions. The first one is at what moment in the class this week? Did you feel most engaged with what was happening? The second one, at what moment did you feel least engaged or most distanced? Third, what action that anyone took, teacher or student, did you find most helpful? Number four, what action that anyone took in the class this week that you find most puzzling or confusing? And finally, what about the class this week's surprise do the most? Could be something from your own reactions, something that someone said or did or anything that occurs to you? So those five questions. And you will get some good sentences from them and you'll get a lot of good insight. It might take you a little bit longer to read through these. And you can make little notes about the patterns you're seeing. But you'll see that sometimes they mention the interactions you're having with another student are actually helping them a lot or interactions that are having them together. And sometimes you'll see that you and your explanations that you think you've done a really good job, they found puzzling or confusing. And that can be so helpful as a teacher just to say, wow, I thought that the way I explained this kind of grammar rule or the way I explained this topic or the story that we were doing or the narrative, I thought it was really clear the way I did that. But obviously four or five of them found that puzzling. And the word puzzling is helpful because it's not a judgment on your teaching. It's just them being a little bit puzzled as to what was going on. And of course, remember, if we want competence, which is a fundamental psychological need of motivation, then they need to be understanding everything. When people don't understand their competence goes down because they feel like they're lost and you lose them. So we really need to try and address these areas. Now that is not to say that there is no challenge in the class. Of course, we have optimal challenge and it's good for people to feel puzzled and confused in particular moments that you have planned for that and that you're going to explain. But we don't want people to be puzzled and confused when we thought we were being clear. So that's the important distinction there. The next one is what I call the traffic light form. And the traffic light form I usually do digitally in the form of a Google form. And it's just like a table. So it would have five or six things that we've been doing on the left. So it might be telling a story in the past talking about dates and numbers. And it could be describing someone and their physical characteristics, whatever, on the left, things that you're doing. And over the top, it's just red, orange, and green. So red means I'm stop. I need more help with this. Orange, I think I got it. And green, I'm good to go. And they just tick those. It's very quick. And when you do it in a Google form, it'll immediately pull all that information together for you automatically. You don't need to analyze it. It's just analyzed straight away. Which is wonderful because I used to have to do it manually. And you can quickly see where the area is that the students are red or orange, that they feel like I'm not getting this. We need to go over it. And that helps you. Because remember, at the end of the day, this is to help you to help the class. It's to help you move forward with your teaching and what needs to change so that you can help your students. And you'll see that, wow, I thought that they were all feeling quite comfortable with telling a story about descriptions, but actually quite a few of them put red there that they don't feel. And another one I put on the left bar is usually understanding the teacher, speaking in Spanish, speaking in Spanish, outside class. And it's kind of, it's the self-assessment as well. Number four is then building on that, which is essentially a more detailed Google form with questions like, what are you enjoying the most? What activities are helping you're learning the most? Which activities are not helping you? Which things would you like me to change? And is there anything I can do as your teacher to improve your experience in my class? Questions like that. And it's a little bit longer. And that would happen maybe once every couple of months. So maybe four times in the whole year. And we do that officially as a school once a year anyway, so they're just kind of building towards that. Because what I felt was, and the research would back this up, is that if you just do feedback once, or once in the year and you ask for a survey or a form from your class once a year, some of them will take that opportunity to kind of tell you about that time three months ago when they felt you were unfair to them. But if you do it regularly, then those patterns kind of crease themselves out. It's okay. If you do it four times a year, then they've had a chance to kind of give you those things and say those things when they're a little bit annoyed. But you can talk to them about the use of the feedback form as for you to be honest, to move it forward. And they don't feel like they're grinding an axe. What they're doing is just trying to share with you and they're more used to it. And it's not like, oh, this is my one opportunity to say what I really think about this class. It's okay. There's going to be students who think that it's not the best in the world, and that's okay. But if you do it regularly, then when you do that official survey that your school may do once a year like we do, then it's not as you don't see those things as surprising when they come out. So I try and do this at least maybe twice before the winter break and maybe twice after the winter break before in between summer. And then finally, the last one is negotiated curriculum. And this comes from Enright and Al in their 2010 paper. But it's actually a negotiated curriculum has been spoken about and written about by many different authors now. And it's where you're getting ideas from the student about what will come next or what we will focus on next. And you're negotiating the curriculum and co-creating it. Now some people isn't going, oh, hold on a minute. How can we do that if we've our units planned out for the year? And you're right, that can be a challenge. But maybe it's in terms of the assessment. So maybe they say, well, we would really like to do a presentation in a group instead of an individual oral exam for this next unit and you can work with that. Or maybe it's we'd like to include a narrative or an historian in terms of the readings. Or we would like to learn much more about sports. I had that one year. I want to learn about sports and talking about sports because there's guys on my team or girls on my team who speak Spanish. And I want to have that vocab. So it wasn't as focus of the whole unit. But I brought it in in our story, the different positions that the person played at the weekend on their sports pitch so that they felt like they were getting that. And I addressed that and said, this came up in your feedback. So I wanted to bring it up and do it with you. And they feel like then that you are listening to their concerns and your co-creating material, giving them that feeling of autonomy, which, of course, builds intrinsic motivation. OK, so what about feedback to the learner? Well, the thing about feedback to the learner, an error correction and corrective feedback. The jury is out, essentially. If you read around the research about this, like there's a paper out by Chain and Al in 2016, where they look at the kind of empirical research and the theoretical relevance in second language acquisition of corrective feedback. And their conclusions, essentially, are that it depends. It depends on the teacher. It depends on the student. It depends on the personality. It depends on how it's done. So there's so many issues with it that it's very difficult to say it works or it doesn't work. Error correction and corrective feedback can move people forward, of course. But it can also completely destroy someone's competence and therefore their motivation. And now you're fighting a losing battle, essentially. So we do have to think about, carefully, how we do feedback. But what we know, or I guess we could say we know, is that feedback and formative assessment practices do play a really important role in moving the learning forward. And of course, that comes out of John Haddie's big study, which has had its criticisms. But still, it really does show the importance of feedback. And many other authors have written about this. Jeff Pettie's book on evidence-based teaching, as I spoke about, talks a lot about the effect size of good feedback. So it is something we need to try and make sure we're doing, but in a way that really moves the learner forward without destroying their motivation and their feeling of competence. So I guess some of my ideas about how I like to do this is, I make sure there are some tasks where I don't correct anything. No errors at all. They're just conversation pieces. And for me, it's not every assessment or everything they do. Of course, not I do correct some things. I don't think I'd have a job if I didn't correct anything. But there has to be some work that is no correction. That they don't feel fear. And for me, it's the reading diary. I talked about that in my reading strategies. They write a reflection on something they've read. I respond to their reflection with a little question. And we begin a written bit of conversation. But rather than me correcting the errors I see, I write in my little bit. I make sure I use some of the words and phrases they got wrong, but I use it in the correct form, because then they're reading it in the correct form. So you're essentially giving I a correction without them knowing it. Another one I like to do is when I'm giving feedback, especially with the younger learners, but also the older learners too, is I just concentrate on one or two errors. And I think it was Beth Skeleton that told me about this first, to try and read through the whole material first, which is difficult without your red pen and not doing anything, skim it, and think the general chase did you get, most of what they were saying, where they're communicating was a quite fluent. And then go back and just pick out one or two of the main errors. It saves you time, you're not correcting everything. And it gives them a sense of competence, because they get it back and there's only three or four marks. And it's on the same words. And then they feel like, okay, these are the ones I have to work on. And if they feel like it's only one or two, it feels achievable. And if they eliminate that for the next time, so if it's like a basic error that does interfere with communication, like mixing up a verb that really changes things. So in Spanish, we often get students saying, "El" or "é" at "tengo". Now "tengo" means "I have". So what they're saying there is, here she "I have", which of course, makes the communication difficult. So you might focus on that one and correct just that, even though there's other things there, there's spelling mistakes, there's accent mistakes, whatever. Let them go, let them slide. They can come to them later. Fix the ones that interfere with communication and just focus on one or two. So you've written your little, whatever way you want to do it. Let's say you put a circle around it, or you've crossed it out and put the correct one. Some people just highlighted and the student has to go and find the answer themselves. Personally, I do give them the answer. I'll then I cross it out and I say this is what it should be. And what they do with that, and this was taught to me when I was in university by my French lecturer, and it really helped me, is they write out in a section of their notebooks called the Corrections. They write out the sentence in the correct form, where the error used to be. So they write the correct form, and they put a circle around the word, or the bit of the word, where they're used to have an error. And they use this to study before a test. So they might only have to write out three or four sentences, let's say, from each piece of work to get back. But when they are revising for a test, it's like they have a teacher under shoulder going, "It's not tiene, it's tingle." But the idea is, they're only correcting one or two things. They feel that's manageable. Their competence is still there. They feel like, "Oh, I got most of right, actually." There's only one or two little things to work on. And they have these corrections that they can look at when they're preparing for an exam. And then after that, what I like to do is what I call medals and missions. Again, this comes from Jeff Paddy's book. And it's very short. So I always give more medals than missions. So the medals are things you did well. And even if it's not very good, you can find something. "Oh, I really like how you wrote the date at the top." I really like how you put this thing here. Give them some things that make them feel good. This was the lovely use of this word. Nice use of this structure here. And then the missions are, don't forget, when the U-Farm is used in Spanish, we have an S at the end. Just one thing like that. And they'll have to reflect on that a little bit. And what did they get from their medals and missions before they write their next piece? They write that at the top of the page. So it's medals and missions. Again, it's from Jeff Paddy's book. And that's the way I do my feedback. And the students say that it does help them. They don't feel like it's overwhelming. That it's not too much. They know what they did well. And they have one thing to work on for the next time. And then building on that for the older students, I use these things called pro-formists. Now these are the older, more advanced students who are writing longer pieces, like four, five, six hundred words. S is that type of thing. So the pro-formist starts with a checklist. Kind of just says, I reach the minimum amount of words. It has an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. It uses this or that. I have addressed the question. I read the question twice. I made a plan before I started. And they take yes, no, maybe. And I can write on that and say, oh, I don't really think you did do this. And next, after that, they write two things I think I did really well. One thing that I would like some feedback on. And then I will give them medals and missions on their feedback page. But also at the end, I give one objective. So the objective, well, with my older students, sometimes it's two. I want you to use this expression next time. And don't forget that this verb ends in this way. And in the next pro-former, they copy my objectives to the top of the page. And the very first question is, did I meet Mr. Printer's objectives? So they are actively trying to put in my specific one or two objectives into their new piece of writing. And it's a loop. And they've really said this work. So then I can see it and prove their writing. Because they're putting in those things you want to see the next time. And it can be very, very powerful. And as they go on, so in the diploma that I teach, they have to know all these different text types, like diaries, former letters, blogs, pamphlets, brochures, all these things. And so once we've done one, the next time they do one have these same text types, let's say they're writing their second brochure like six months after the first one. The first box the top is, what I learned from my feedback on my last brochure. And they'll look back at their medals and missions and their objectives. And they'll say stuff like, oh, I need to remember to put an introduction. I need to make sure I have images. And I also have to make sure that I put the subtitles and subjunctives comes with his phrase, whatever. But that's how they start every time. So they're really learning from their own feedback last time. And finally, this one might upset people. I don't really know how people will take this. But I read a book called Creating Cultures of Thinking by Ron Richard. And there's a case study about a teacher who gave all his feedback to his most advanced students, his A-level students or his AP students. Those students were 17, 18, 19 preparing for big exams for me. It's the diploma students. He gave it to them one-on-one in a conversation and he corrected it there and then beside them. I brought this in three years ago and it has revolutionized the feedback. So many levels do it. Number one, the students are getting all this feedback from you while you're there. They're listening to you speak Spanish because the feedback is entirely in Spanish. You're having a conversation with them all, how's things, how did the match go yesterday? Or did you see that new series, your building relationships? And they can see what you look at as an examiner. Now, is it time consuming? Of course, it's time consuming. You have to plan it in lunch times. You'll have to do it maybe in your free periods. You work out their free periods. But it means one, I never take your 12 and 13, my oldest students, never, ever, ever take their work home to correct. It's always corrected with them beside me. Does take some planning. Does take away some of my free periods. But it gives me so much more time in the evening. And what I get from the relationships there is so much more. Now, you can't do it maybe for every single student, every single time. Maybe you have to plan it like that. If you have a really big class. Maybe it's every second one. Maybe it's, you know, group A. You do it for this one. Group B this time. And we typically do a written task for those older students every couple of weeks, two to three weeks with proper feedback. And they'll come in and they'll meet with me at a time that suits them. And me, we organize that in the first class. And they get it one on one, but they also get that little conversation with me for 10 minutes. And that is the difference because their practice and their oral skills at the same time that they're getting their feedback from you. They're listening to your language and your chatting. So for me, it's really worth the time. And the final thing I'd like to say on feedback is just put so much more time into your formative tasks rather than the summit of the ones that count towards a grade. The formative ones, the ones that they're practicing, put much more time into feedback on that than you do on a test. Because usually on a test, you're moving on to the next unit anyway, you can just give them really quick feedback one sentence about how it was. But the formative tasks that are moving them forward during the year, they're the ones that you put lots of time and effort to giving them really good constructive feedback on. So I hope that was useful and helpful. Just a few ideas about how we can give feedback and error correction to our older students but also to the younger ones that medals in missions format and not correcting everything. That's the way I like to do it. But as I say, there's many opinions out there and I would love to hear from you on the ways that you do it. Thank you so much for listening to the Motivated Classroom Podcast. A huge thank you to my patrons on the Patreon page. Go look it up. The Motivated Classroom, if you feel like supporting these four episodes you get a month just with one little coffee or a bag of crisps that would be wonderful and really appreciated. If not, just keep sharing with everyone. Next week, we are going to talk about teacher motivation and how we can ensure we as teachers remain motivated. Thank you so much, Germa Gutt, Agaslan Awalian. The Motivated Classroom Podcast is an original production by Lee Imprinter. I'm @LeeImprinter on Twitter and my YouTube channel is LeeImprinter, the Motivated Classroom. Full podcast notes with links to resources are available on my website, LeeImprinter.com. For more, find and follow the Motivated Classroom Podcast on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Graphics and music are provided by Paul Mahan. Intro clips are thanks to the wonderful multi-lingual staff at the International School of Losing.